no easy answer: representative bureaucracy and police use

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

Volume 3 Issue 2 Article 8

August 2019

No Easy Answer: Representative Bureaucracy and No Easy Answer: Representative Bureaucracy and

Police Use of Force Police Use of Force

Jacob Herrera University of Colorado,Denver

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2019 THE HATFIELD GRADUATE JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS 1

No Easy Answer:

Representative Bureaucracy and Police Use of

Force

Jacob Herrera

University of Colorado-Denver

The theory of Representative Bureaucracy is a well-studied concept in Public

Administration, positing that more representative government agencies will lead to

greater equity for underserved groups. This paper is review of empirical applications

of the theory to the use of force by police and it will show that the work does not

support the idea that more representative police departments correlate with lower

rates of use of force against minority groups. Implications for future studies are

addressed at the end of the article.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.10.15760/hgjpa.2019.3.2.8

2 NO EASY ANSWER Vol. 3:2

Introduction he use of force by police is one of the most controversial forms of

government interactions in a democratic society. Police violence is laden

with political saliency and represents a historical flashpoint between

government and disadvantaged groups. Since the summer of 2014, public

scrutiny of the use of force has created a cycle of scandal and reform that has

tested the legitimacy of American policing. One approach that has been

widely posited as a balm for strained community-police relations is the theory

of representative bureaucracy. This paper will show that the findings related

to the use of force and representative bureaucracy are complex and defy the

popular notion that increased minority representation leads to lower amounts

of force. This paper will begin with a brief overview of the theory of

representative bureaucracy and how it intersects with policing in a broad sense

before providing a detailed review of the literature on representative

bureaucracy and the use of force.

Representative Bureaucracy Most contemporary work on Representative Bureaucracy has been

strongly influenced by Mosher’s Democracy and the Public Service, which

argued that the demographic composition of bureaucracy could be harnessed

as a force that helps government work on behalf of underrepresented groups

via a process called passive representation.1 Passive representation is when

bureaucrats mirror the demographic characteristics of a community.2 Passive

representation leads to active representation. Active representation occurs

when the representative bureaucrat exercises their discretion in such a way

that it produces outcomes favorable to the represented. Active representation

is a way of making the delivery of government service more equitable to non-

dominant social groups.

Scholars have identified several conditions that are necessary for passive

representation to transform into active representation. First, bureaucrats must

have discretion, they need enough procedural slack so that they have space to

operationalize their values.3 Second, the bureaucrats must be in a policy arena that is important for the demographic group at issue.4 An archetype of this

would be a Native American employee of the US Department of Interior with

some decisional making authority related to the downsizing of protected

monuments adjacent to tribal land.

T

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 [2019], Art. 8


Representative bureaucracy has a strong empirical pedigree. Scholars

have linked minority representation in government service to outcomes that

benefit minority groups.5 As the theory has gained prominence, it has been

widely applied to a multitude of government activities, including policing.

This review seeks to answer the following question: Does increased

representation lead to fewer instances of police violence?

Representative Bureaucracy and Policing

Police organizations offer rich hunting grounds to representative

bureaucratic researchers for two principal reasons. First, the workaday

experiences of police officers are infused with discretion which facilitates

active representation. 6 Second, the overwhelming historical context of

policing since the 1960s in the United States is centered around conflict

between police and underrepresented groups. 7 Indeed, race is the most

common demographic feature of representative bureaucracy scholarship and

policing.8

Researchers have used the theory to hypothesize that greater diversity

within police agencies will lessen the strain with minority citizens because

minority officers will have shared life experiences, and values as those being

policed.9 Calls for greater racial diversity in law enforcement are a familiar

theme following popular protest directed at policing. Both the Kerner

Commission in 1968 10 and the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century

Policing11 in 2015 offered the increased hiring of minority officers as a means

of improving relations between police and minority groups. Like work related

to the use of force, broader applications of the theory have produced mixed

results. In one study, citizens were more likely to perceive police as legitimate

if they were carried out by officers of the same race, regardless of outcomes.12

Other work in the theory has produced an opposite result, showing that an

increase in minority officers were associated with an uptick in traffic stops

considered indicative of racial profiling.13 Moreover, an efficiency argument

has been made in advance of the theory, as there is some empirical evidence

suggesting that an increase in ethnic minorities contributes to a lessening of

crime.14

Still another approach is that of Brown 15 who argues that minority

representation does little to alter police behavior or institutionalized practices.

Far from using active representation to further minority interests, minority

officers are hired to democratize police misconduct and be made complicit in

oppressive practices. Minority officers normalize harmful police activity

rather than acting as agents of meaningful change that would benefit

Herrera: No Easy Answer


underrepresented groups. For Brown, representation does not matter if the

core task of the police is the control of minorities.

A sterling example of how the theory does not provide easy answers can

be found in a single study by Hong.16 He found that even though a small

increase in the ratio of ethnic minority officers was associated with an 11

percent decrease in substantiated complaints of misconduct, as the proportion

of ethnic minority officers increased, so did their share of citizen complaints.

Hong attributed this to the fact that the cohort of diverse officers was less

experienced or qualified than their white peers. Hong did not address the

possibility that the uptick in police complaints against the minority officers

were the result of discrimination.

Use of Force in Brief

The legal use of force by police officers is the definitive element of

policing and perhaps its most studied.17 Related to representative bureaucracy,

studies on race and police use of force have been prolific. Indeed, the first

published account on police use of force by Robin18 centered around race, and

criminal justice and various cognate fields have produced reams of

scholarship with small nodes of consensus. Although it is widely accepted that

there are racial disparities in police use of force, controversy is generally

rooted on variations of whether the disparity is the result of legitimate factors-

like behavior during police encounters, and rates of violent offending- or

illegitimate factors like police prejudice. 19 The state of the field can be

described as “murky” as there is empirical evidence supporting both

positions.20 One problem clouding use of force research is high political

saliency, which has contributed to sloppy research being used to prop up

ideological biases.21 A final impediment to research continuity is a lack of

reliable data. The federal government does not mandate the reporting of use

of force incidents from local departments, not even for police caused

homicides.

Representative Bureaucracy and the Use of Force Scholars have turned to representative bureaucracy to provide a stable

theoretical framework for exploring use of force and race. The working

hypothesis of works looking at representative bureaucracy and use of force is

that a more representative police department will use less force, particularly

excessive force towards minority residents. Proponents of the theory argue



that increased numbers of minority and female police officers will produce

more opportunities to deescalate tense encounters.22

Like the greater body of work on use of force, literature on representative

bureaucracy arcs towards inconsistency in both findings and methods, as

illustrated in Table 1 in the appendix. The literature uses various dependent

variables to apply the use of force to representative bureaucracy. Therefore,

this review is structured thematically by police caused homicides, citizen

complaints of excessive force and violence against police.

Police Caused Homicides In 2003, Smith 23 examined the role of representativeness in police

departments and police shootings by comparing the race of people killed by

police, and racial composition of police departments. Smith found that the

racial makeup of the police departments was not statistically related to the

level of police caused homicides, and the variable with the strongest

relationship was the level of violent crime. Smith theorized that this does not

dismiss the validity of the theory, as police shootings are only the most

extreme outcome that can result between a police-citizen encounter. Smith

stated that there may be a myriad of positive encounters associated with

increased diversity that are very difficult to capture.

In the provocatively-titled “Will More Black Cops Matter?” Nicholson-

Crotty et al.,24 revisited the issue of lethal force used against minority citizens

via representative bureaucracy. Like the 2003 Smith article, there was no

evidence to suggest that a higher of ratio black officers was related to fewer

fatal police shootings of black citizens. In fact, there was more support for the

idea that increasing the number of black officers correlated with an increase

of the deaths of black citizens due to police intervention. This is not a new

result. One study showed that an increase in the number of black officers

increased the rate of lethal police violence to black citizens, and that black

officers were less likely to use lethal force against whites.25

The Nicholson et al. article26 is worth highlighting because it introduces

the concept of critical mass to the representative bureaucracy and use of force literature. Critical mass represents a demographic tipping point in which

minority officers have enough cultural and managerial sway so that they can

create the agency needed for active representation. The authors argue that a

critical mass of minority officers is needed to alter police subculture, which is

predisposed to perceive minority citizens as threats.



Police subculture has been described as insular and successful at creating

in-group cohesion that builds strong institutional behavioral norms.27 This

culture fosters an espirit de corps that overpowers other sources of social

identity and prevents officers from acting in a way consistent with

representative bureaucracy theory. In other words, scholars credit the police

subculture for the failure to actualize the gain to minority citizens that are

observed in the study of representative bureaucracy in other fields.

Institutional or organizational variables can reverse passive representation as

racial identity is trumped by occupational identity.28 This can result in both

white and minority officers becoming “blind to their aggressive responses to

citizens of color.”29

The final piece of this section stands apart in the field. Race and Representative Bureaucracy in American Policing by Kennedy, Butz,

Lajevardi and Nanes is a monograph that is the most comprehensive and

definitive work on the subject to date.30 First, the authors incorporated a time

series analysis of multiple questions related to representative bureaucracy

stretching from 1993 to 2013 from the 100 largest cities in the US, which is

the most complete dataset in the field. The authors found that despite active

recruitment efforts aimed at increasing diversity, the actual level of

representation during the time frame decreased. Kennedy et al. found that

increased representativeness was associated with a decrease in excessive force

complaints as well as a compliant reporting procedure that were more

accessible to community members. 31 Police agencies that were more

representative were also more likely to be accompanied by some feature of

civilian oversight, which the authors theorized could be favorable to minority

citizens. Administrative polices were more inclined towards civilian oversight

in police departments that were more racially representative. One of the

strengths of the study was the extension of research into administrative

policies governing the use of force rather than a reporting of use of force

outcomes by race. The inclusion of administrative policy captures an element

of passive representation that is unique in the literature, which bolsters the

validity of the theory and opens avenues for other researchers. As the authors

write, “our evidence leaves little doubt that passive representation matters a

great deal to the policies, practices and performance of American Law

Enforcement.”32

The authors included in their monograph an examination between racial

representativeness and lethal force, which is structured like the preceding

literature. They hypothesized that a more representative police force would

yield fewer lethal encounters for two reasons. First, officers will use their

discretion to create outcomes marked by de-escalation. Secondly, citizens will

see a representative police force as more legitimate and will therefore be less



likely to contest arrest. This study uses a series of multivariate regression

models that test for a relationship between racial representative and police

caused homicides. This data set is unique as it covers a longer span of time

than other studies of police-related homicides. The study found that greater

racial representativeness was associated with an increase in the number of

police related homicides, “counties in which the racial demographics of the

police more closely match the population demographics have higher rates of

civilian deaths due to legal intervention.”33

The authors theorize that this counterintuitive finding may be a sign that

policing is improving, as police are more proactively protecting the

community. Indeed, one familiar criticism of American policing is the concept

of under policing, where police pursue crime with less vigor in minority

communities. 34 More police shootings could be a signal of active

representation, as minority officers are more likely to establish connections

that produce better criminal intelligence and more encounters with violent

offenders. It may also indicate that minority officers are more likely to view

crime committed in minority neighborhoods as serious events and exert more

effort in prevention and investigative follow-up.

In summary, there is no evidence connecting increased minority

representation in policing with a reduction in police caused homicides.

Excessive Force Complaints Five of the studies included in this review used complaints of excessive

force as the dependent variable. These are official complaints that citizens file

to either internal affairs offices, oversight bodies or civil right lawsuits. Smith

and Holmes35 conducted a study looking at a relationship between racial

representation and excessive force complaints. Smith and Holmes utilized the

study to test a theory that is related to representative bureaucracy; the racial

threat hypothesis. The racial threat hypothesis frames police violence as the

dominant group using state action to control or punish minority groups. Police

violence is part of a comprehensive government regime aimed at protecting

the economic and political advantages of the dominant group.36 The minority

threat hypothesis treats racial disparities in police violence as a means of social control. Police violence can be expected to be higher in areas of

concentrated minority populations and social disorganization.37 This Smith

and Holmes paper used civil rights criminal complaints as their dependent

variable as a measure of excessive force. The findings in the study were

mixed, showing that a greater proportion of Latino officers was associated

with a decrease in excessive force cases, but that there was no relationship



between the ratio of black officers to the black populace. The study did find

some support for the racial threat hypothesis as there were more excessive

force cases filed in cities that were highly segregated.

Smith and Holmes38 conducted a similar study in 2014 with results that

were flipped from their 2003 work. This paper found that greater ratio of black

officers to black residents was associated with less excessive force

complaints, but that the reverse was true for Latino officers. As the police

departments become more representative for Latinos, excessive force cases

increased. Smith and Holmes reconcile this finding by noting that increasing

representation in police departments may not “overcome the profound

structural inequalities of race and class that characterize many American cities

and produce excessive force complaints.”39 In other words, the problems of

racially disparate use of force outcomes are deeply rooted in a context of

historical discrimination that extends well beyond policing.

Hickman and Piquero40 completed a well-structured examination of the

factors of excessive force complaints which touched upon minority

representation in police ranks. An important feature of this paper is that

Hickman and Piquero completed multiple sets of bivariate analyses to test

various ideas. For example, a bivariate look at minority representation ratio

and sustained excessive force complaints showed a positive relationship, but

when other environmental variables were added, the relationship went away.

In a summation of their findings, the authors wrote that it appeared “that

complaint rates and the percentage sustained are influenced by factors other

than minority representation within police agencies.”41 As their study was

built on aggregate level data, the writers surmise that large police agencies

that are representative of their cities are at times operating under consent

decrees and may therefore have a history of excessive force. The authors

conclude by warning that representative bureaucracy researchers should not

jump ship based on their findings, but that researchers looking at use of force

differentials would have more luck finding meaningful factors elsewhere.

Trochman and Gover42 used census data from cities with more than

100,000 people and data on excessive force data to examine use of force and

representation. A feature of the study was the use of time series data from

2003 and 2007. In echoes of the Hickman and Piquero piece, an initial bivariate relationship showing less excessive force complaints for more

representative departments faded away when other control variables were

introduced.



The works reviewed in this section offer similar conclusions—historical

and neighborhood contexts are more important than racial composition of

police when examining the use of force.

Violence Against Police Two different studies have used representative bureaucracy to examine

the other side of police violence. Barrick, Hickman and Strom43 tested for a

relationship between assaults against officers and levels of representativeness.

The authors theorized that a higher proportion of minority officers would lead

to an increase in police legitimacy that would lessen violent challenges to

police authority. The authors found that higher levels of minority

representation were not associated with a decrease in assaults against police.

This finding was confirmed in a more recent study by Ozkan, Worrall and

Piquero.44 Both sets of authors speculated that departments which showed

high levels of representation might have reached that state because of federal

intervention following consent decrees. Therefore, agencies with high

numbers of minority officers may be situated in a context of community

distrust of police which would contribute to assaults on police. This was

reiterated in the other study of assaults against police which noted that use of

force outcomes framed solely in racial representation of police are likely to

fly over contextual problems embedded in cities.45

If there is one general theme to be parsed from this review it is that

location matters. Nearly all the authors, after null findings for the theory,

concluded that the local context in terms of both violent crime and historical

relations between the community and police were more important than the

racial makeup of police when searching for explanatory variables for the use

of force.

Discussion The most interesting intersect between representative bureaucracy and the

use of force is the nature of active representation. Active representation holds

that discretion can be a means of delivering more equitable outcomes, but

what that means is a normative judgment.

Most of the literature reviewed in this paper assumed that if active

representation occurred in policing it would result in fewer police

enforcement actions against minorities. However, multiple studies did not



yield support for this hypothesis and authors sought to preserve the validity of

active representation by describing how police organizational culture

subsumes other values. In addition to the works covered in this paper, other

literature on representative bureaucracy have echoed that organizational

culture and formalization can moderate opportunities for active representation

to the extent that these factors may “[trump] racial affinities.” 46 Another

theory is Gilmartin’s hypervigilance. This posits that police identity consumes

other sources of police officer’s self-image via a physiological process

triggered by officers’ overriding concern for officer safety.47 Any officer’s

inclination to assume a minority representation role might be severely blunted

by realities related to self-preservation that are unique to American policing.

Although police subculture may explain the lackluster realization of

active representation, representative bureaucracy theory is vulnerable to

complexity. Indeed, scholars have recognized that as bureaucratic decisions

become complex, discretion is harder to account for.48 Use of force outcomes

are inherently complex as they are influenced by a mix of psychological,

ecological, socioeconomic, organizational, political and behavioral variables

embedded in a context of racial subjugation both local and national. The most

complex and seemingly intractable challenge to representative bureaucracy

and the use of force is that the use of force can be interpreted as both the

presence or absence of active representation.

As the Kennedy et al. monograph speculated, higher rates of force by

representative police departments may be the byproduct of increased

community engagement and even trust in the police. This idea is new to the

literature, but it has strong anecdotal support from the personal narratives of

high-ranking minority officers who joined their respective departments to help

clean up minority neighborhoods by locking up criminals.49 While this idea is

provocative, more theory building, and research are needed to flesh out its

dimensions.

Recommendations for Future Study The strongest recommendation for future study would be the inclusion of

qualitative and observational studies. Qualitative studies could shed light on

the inconclusive findings by stepping back from raw numbers of force

incidents and deconstructing the thought processes of the participants of a

force encounter. Observational studies typically involve a team of researchers

conducting ride a-longs with officers. These types of studies have led to some

of the strongest use of force theories and they would help researchers examine



a fuller range of behaviors and outcomes than simply if there was or was not

force used.50 Observational studies enable researchers to account for who and

what escalates an encounter and the degree to which citizens and officers of

different demographic backgrounds interact from start to finish.

Interviews with officers and citizens could also pin down conceptions of

what active representation looks like to different populations. For officers

from underrepresented groups, active representation could be expressed as an

aggressive style of policing that targets hardcore criminals that victimize a

certain community. For members of a community that feels over-policed,

active representation may be voiced as a form of policing that less reliant on

enforcement and more engaged with the community. In short, qualitative

works are the only viable path for testing more complex assessments of active

representation. Interviews might reveal that citizens and police want a blended

version of active representation in which police accrue better intelligence on

criminals without increasing the enforcement footprint for a given

neighborhood. Indeed, this tension—between enforcement and harassment—

are reflected in police-community disagreements over how to respond to

violent crime in tight geographic pockets.51

The theory also needs more longitudinal tests. Active representation

might best be measured in terms of decades, particularly when one considers

the uneven rate that different agencies experience hiring surges and freezes.

Only Kennedy et al.52 looked at the problem at the decade level, and that lead

to unique insights about the value of administrative policy. An additional next

step would be looking at representation for other minority subsets of the

population. To the knowledge of the author, there is no published work on

representative bureaucracy and tribal policing, and there is also no work

exploring representation in terms of primary spoken language. Are police

departments with a higher representation of bilingual officers less likely to use

force than those with fewer?

Conclusion The study of representative bureaucracy and the use of force by police

has produced results that do not support the hypothesis that more representative police departments use less force. The lack of a relationship

mirrors similar inconsistency in the larger field of use of force research. A

review of the evidence did provide support that passive representation was

associated with administrative policies that were more favorable to minority

groups, but the literature is not yet at a point of agreement on what active



representation would look like and much less that it empirically exists.

Appendix

Table 1. Reviewed works on Representative Bureaucracy Theory and use of force.

Study

Dependent Variable

Independent Variables

Controls

Method

Result

Smith, Brad W. (2003).

Police Caused

Homicides.

Agency minority

representation

ratio (race and gender),

proportion of

residents black and Latino,

income

inequality.

Violent crime rate,

city size

and region.

Negative binomial

regression

Higher proportion of

black residents,

the greater number of police

shootings.

Nicholson-

Crotty, Sean,

Jill Nicholson-

Crotty, and

Sergio Fernandez

(2017).

Police

Caused

Homicides.

Percentage of

black officers

in a department.

Whites

killed by

police, percentage

population

black, poverty,

officers

per capita.

Multivariate Increasing the

numbers of black

officers linked to increase in the

number of black

citizens killed by police.

Kennedy et

al.

Police

Caused

Homicides.

Racial

representativen

ess

Citizen

diversity,

proportion of county

that is

black.

Multivariate Agencies that are

more

representative have more police

shootings.

Smith, Brad W., Holmes

and Malcolm

D. Holmes (2003)

Citizen complaints

of

Excessive Force (Civil

Right

Lawsuits)

Agency minority

representation

ratio (race and gender),

residency

requirement for police,

income

inequality, proportion of

residents black

and Latino

City size and

region.

Negative binomial

regression

and multivariate

More Latino officers related to

fewer excessive

force complaints; no relationship

with black

officers.

Hickman,

Matthew J.,

and Alex R. Piquero

Citizen

complaints

of Excessive

Minority

representation

ratio, organizational

N/A. Bivariate

and

Multivariate

Minority

representation not

significant in terms of use of



(2009).

Force. structure of the

police

department, administrative

features,

environmental.

force.

Smith, Brad W., Holmes

and Malcolm

D. Holmes (2014).

Citizen complaints

of

Excessive Force.

Three categories of

variables

related to minority

threat, community

accountability,

and ecological.

City characteris

tics

Multivariate Regression

Greater ratio of black officers

associated with

decreased force, Force increased.

with Latino representation.

Trochman, Maren B.,

and Angela

Gover (2016).

Citizen complaints

of

Excessive Force.

Agency representativen

ess by race and

residency (in agency

boundaries).

Agency size,

presence

of civilian oversight,

crime rates

and socioecon

omic

factors

Multivariate No statistically significant

relationship

between representativenes

s and use of

force.

Kennedy et al. Citizen

complaints

of

Excessive

Force.

Racial

representativen

ess.

City size,

agency

size,

unemploy

ment.

Multivariate Less complaints

of excessive force

when agency is

more

representative of

blacks.

Barrick, Kelle,

Matthew J.

Hickman, and Kevin J.

Strom (2014).

Assaults against

police.

Agency minority

representation

ratio, community

policing.

Rate of aggravated

assault,

concentrated

disadvanta

ge, ratio of police to

citizens, population

size and

density.

Multivariate Regression

Higher level of representation

associated with

higher levels of assaults against

police.

Ozkan, Turgut, John

L. Worrall,

and Alex R. Piquero

(2016).

Assaults against

police.

Agency representativen

ess by race and

gender.

Education, community

relations,

community policing,

and

conducted energy

device use,

violent crime and

poverty.

Multivariate Minority police representation not

significantly

related to assaults against police.



1 Frederick Mosher, Democracy and the Public Service (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968),

3.

2 Ibid, 12.

3 Vicky Wilkins and Brian Williams, “Representing Blue: Representative Bureaucracy and Racial

Profiling in the Latino Community,” Administration & Society 40, no.8 (2009), 777.

4 Sean Nicholson-Crotty, Jill Nicholson-Crotty, and Sergio Fernandez, “Will More Black Cops

Matter? Officer Race and Police-Involved Homicides of Black Citizens,” Public Administration

Review 77, no. 2 (2017), 208.

5 Kenneth Meier and Laurence Toole Jr., Bureaucracy in a Democratic State (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins, 2006), 1142.

6 William K. Muir, Jr., Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1977), 13.

7 Samuel Walker and Charles Katz, The Police In America ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), 41.

8 Wilkins and Williams, “Representing Blue,” 778.

9 Brad Smith, “The Impact of Police Officer Diverstiy on Police-Caused Homicides,” Policy Studies

Journal 31, no. 2 (May 2003), 151.

10 Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington

D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1968).

11 President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President's Task Force on

21st Century Policing (Washington D.C.:, Office of Community Orientated Policing Services,

2015).

12 Nick Theobald and Donald Haider-Markel, “Race, Bureaucracy, and Symbolic Representation:

Interactions between Citizens and Police,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

19, no. 2 (2009), 411.

13 Vicky Wilkins and Brian Williams, “Black or Blue: Racial Profiling and Representative

Bureaucracy,” Public Administration Review 68, no. 4 (2008), 660.

14 Sounman Hong, “Representative Bureaucracy, Organizational Integrity, and Citizen

Coproduction: Does an Increase in Police Ethnic Representativeness Reduce Crime?” Journal of

Policy Analysis and Management 35, no. 1 (2016), 30.

15 Liyah K. Brown, “Officer or Overseer? Why Police Desegregation Fails as an Adequate Solution

to Racist, Oppressive and Violent Policing in Black Communities,” New York University Review

of Law and Social Change 29, no. 4 (2004), 778.

16 Sounman Hong, “Does Increasing Ethnic Representativeness Reduce Police Misconduct,” Public

Administration Review 77, no. 2 (2016), 203.

17 Egon Bitner, The Functions of Police In a Modern Society (Chevy Chase, Md: National Institute

of Health, 1970).

Notes



18 Gerald D. Robin, “Justifiable Homicide by Police Officers,” Journal of Criminal Law,

Criminology and Police Science 54 (1963), 226.

19 Lorie Fridell, “Explaining the Disparity in Results Across Studies Assessing Racial Disparity in

Police Use of Force: A Research Note,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 42 (2017), 503.

20 Cynthia Lum, “Murky Research Waters,” Criminology and Public Policy 15, no. 2 (2016), 453.

21 Fridell, “Explaining the Disparity in Results Across Studies Assessing Racial Disparity in Police

Use of Force,” 502-513; Jennifer Gonzalez, Katelyn Jetelina, and Stephen Bishop, “Toward a

Constructive Public Health Agenda on Race and Police Use of Force,” American Journal of

Public Health 107, no. 8 (2017), E22.

22 Nicholson, Nicholson-Crotty, and Fernandez, “Will More Black Cops Matter? Officer Race and

Police-Involved Homicides of Black Citizens,” 206-216.

23 Smith, “The Impact of Police Officer Diversity on Police-Caused Homicides,” 147-163.

24 Nicholson, Nicholson-Crotty, and Fernandez, “Will More Black Cops Matter?” 213.

25 Holona Ochs, “The Politics of Inclusion: Black Political Incorporation and the Use of Lethal

Force,” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 9, no. 3 (2011), 251.

26 Nicholson, Nicholson-Crotty, and Fernandez, “Will More Black Cops Matter?” 206-216.

27 Bitner, “The Functions of Police In Modern Society,” 64.

28 Wilkins and Williams, “Black or Blue: Racial Profiling and Representative Bureaucracy,” 660.

29 Mario Rivera and James Ward, “Toward an Analytical Framework for the Study of Race and

Violence,” Public Administration Review 77, no. 2 (2017), 242.

30 Brandy Kennedy, Adam Butz, Nazita Lajevardi, and Matthew Nanes, Race and Representative

Bureaucracy in American Policing (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan, 2017).

31 Ibid, 68.

32 Ibid, 108.

33 Ibid, 104.

34 Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (San Francisco: Spiegal and Grau,

2015), 382, Kindle.

35 Brad Smith and Malcolm Holmes, “Community Accountability, Minority Threat, and Police

Brutality: An Examination of Civil Rights Complaints,” Criminology 41, no. 4 (2003), 1035-

1064.

36 Michael Smith, Jeff Rojeck, Matthew Petrocelli, and Brian Withrow, “Measuring Disparities in

Police Activities: A State of the Art Review,” Policing: An International Journal of Police

Strategies & Management 40, no. 2 (2017), 174.

37 Smith and Holmes, “Community Accountability, Minority Threat, and Police Brutality,” 1040.

38 Brad Smith and Malcolm Holmes, “Police Use of Excessive Force in Minority Communities: A

Test of the Minority Threat, Place and Community Accountability Hypotheses,” Social Problems

61, no. 1 (2014), 83-104.



39 Ibid, 98.

40 Matthew Hickman and Alex Piquero, “Organizational, Administrative and Environmental

Correlates of Complaints About Police Use of Force: Does Minority Representation Matter?”

Crime and Delinquency 55, no. 1 (2009), 3-27.

41 Ibid, 19.

42 Maren B. Trochman and Angela Gover, “Measuring the Impact of Police Representativeness on

Communities,” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 39, no. 4

(2016), 773-790.

43 Kelle Barrick, Matthew Hickman, and Kevin Strom, “Representative Policing and Violence

Towards the Police,” Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 8, no. 2 (2014), 193-204.

44 Turgut Ozkan, John Worrall, and Alex Piquero, “Does Minority Representation in Police Agencies

Reduce Assaults on the Police?” American Journal of Criminal Justice 41, no. 3 (2016), 417.

45 Ibid, 419.

46 Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Inside the Black Box of Racially Representative Bureaucracies,” in Work

and the Welfare State, ed. Evelyn Z Brodkin and Gregory Marston, (Washington, DC:

Georgetown University Press 2013), 168.

47 Kevin Gilmartin, Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement (Tucson, Arizona: E-S Press:2010), 42.

48 Jessica Sowa and Sally Selden, “Administrative Discretion and Active Representation: An

Expansion of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy,” Public Administration Review 63, no. 6

(2003), 702.

49 James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2017), 80.

50 Geoffrey Alpert and Roger Dunham, Understanding Police Use of Force (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press: 2009), 507, Kindle.

51 Cindy Chang, “L.A. Metro Cops are in a Bind: Avoid Racial Profiling While Also Fighting

Crime” L.A. Times (Los Angeles, CA), April 21, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-

me-lapd-traffic-stops-black-drivers-metro-20190421-story.html.

52 Kennedy, Butz, Lajevardi, and Nanes, Race and Representative Bureaucracy in American

Policing.

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no easy answer: representative bureaucracy and police use

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